Daily Archives: July 22, 2019

I had the occasion on Saturday last to travel to Kirkwood, all of 14 miles west of my home, to attend a graduation party for one of my beloved high school seniors.

I took I-44, then exited at Big Bend Boulevard and kept on driving west.

For certain, the big black hearse was nowhere near as I turned right onto Big Bend. But the next time I glanced in the rear view mirror, there it was. A hulking omen. Like the Grim Reaper had sent a reminder to drive safely. Or that days are here one moment, and gone the next, as the Psalmist says.

That black hearse followed me for miles until I turned onto the residential street. And then it was gone.

I haven’t many superstitions, and I understand that we all die, but the hearse threw me a wobble Saturday!

Fast forward an hour to a grumpy Postal Service employ.

I’m leaving the graduation party. The employee, safely in her USPS delivery vehicle, yells over to me “do you life here?” I assured her I didn’t. “Well, you’re gonna have a lot of angry neighbors. I can’t deliver the mail with all these cars parked on the street, and I’m not gonna get out of this truck.”

Whatever happened to “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds“? Did this get amended by act of Congress to read “but parked vehicles will”?